Gen Z grew up with social media, and it shows in how some of its youngest entrepreneurs are building businesses.
Michael Satterlee didn’t launch his “tactical reload can holder” — a clever spin on a can cooler that brings in up to $300,000 in sales a month — with an expensive ad campaign. The teenage entrepreneur posted a fairly low-production video of himself chugging a Dr. Pepper and then “reloading” another into holder.
The video has been viewed more than 50 million times on Instagram.
Satterlee attributed its success partly to the novelty of the product. “I think it’s just, they hadn’t seen anything like it before,” he told Business Insider.
The viral video helped drive demand for his e-commerce company, Cruise Cup, but Satterlee said businesses shouldn’t just fill their social media pages with product pitches.
“You have to disguise your business account like you’re an influencer,” he said. That means following trends, entertaining viewers, interacting with them, and giving them a reason to follow the account beyond simply wanting to buy a product.
“At the end of the day, what followers are is an audience. People aren’t just going to follow a product. You want to build a community.”
Social media’s value goes beyond sales
Kirk and Jacob McKinney, who also started their company as teenagers, have built a large following — 500,000 followers across all social platforms — but are using it in a different way than Satterlee.
Their company, Junk Teens, provides junk-removal services throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Rather than relying primarily on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube to generate customers, the brothers use those platforms to build a recognizable brand and attract young employees.
“We didn’t even post on social media until our third year in business,” Kirk said. “It was never a part of the foundation. It was always just like a cherry on top, like steroids for the business.”
Courtesy of Kirk and Jacob McKinney
The brothers initially built Junk Teens, which brought in about $3 million in 2025, through more traditional entrepreneurial fundamentals: responding quickly and consistently to customers, booking every available job, and reinvesting in the business. Social media became a way to address one of the company’s biggest long-term challenges: recruiting workers.
“In any home-service or blue-collar business, one of the most important parts of the whole business is the employees, the people, the team,” Kirk said. “And I think one of the hardest parts of every home-service or blue-collar business is hiring good employees.”
He acknowledged that junk removal may not sound like the most appealing job, and that people often associate it with “trash, junk, hard work, long days,” but there is more to the work than that.
“I wanted to attract people to work on our team by showing that what we do is fun,” he said. “We get to work with our friends and make a lot of money while doing it.”
The brothers also tailor their strategy to each platform rather than posting the same content everywhere. On Facebook, for example, they focus on their local community, sharing updates about the company’s growth, its work, and its impact.
“Facebook is direct value,” Kirk said. “We get customers from there.”
Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube play different roles. Those platforms do not typically generate customers, Kirk said, “but we post on those platforms because we know that’s where our generation hangs out.”
The goal is to use those channels to build a brand that young people recognize and associate with opportunity.
“We want to create a brand that sticks, that people remember,” he said, “and they know Junk Teens is a spot you go to for a good job.”
